alexlockwood.net

More on ads: the Exxon ‘flip-flop’

I’m writing this blog as it’s announced that Exxon’s damages for the Valdez oil spill, in 1989, have finally been agreed. Nineteen years after.  The oil company are also infamous for allegedly providing US$23m to undermine the science of climate change, and offering scientists and economists $10,000 each to undermine the findings of the latest IPCC report. Now Exxon have just released these ‘game-changing’ climate ads across Europe. A flip-flop, or just good old greenwash?

Mitchell Anderson over at DeSmogBlog has already provided a great summary of Exxon’s activities, so I won’t repeat it here. It’s important and fair to note that this is not the only perspective on the issue. Some bloggers are picking up on the story/allegation that the scientific community are cashing in on global warming, and that finance is the biggest draw for shouting loudest on climate change as a threat. I totally disagree with that, but it’s out there. (Oh, and here’s the link to how much they’re paying for the Exxon Valdez spill).

So from me, rather, a few comments on the discourse of these adverts from Exxon, ad by ad (click on the ad for larger versions):

• These ads are for European magazines and markets only. Not US.
• “But addressing climate change is a shared global challenge” - i.e. this is our small bit, what about yours, Europe? Game theory reciprocity enacted as a corporate strategy
• Investment in alternatives? As Anderson notes on DeSmogBlog, Exxon “have chosen to invest less than 4% of [Shell and BP's investment] - $300 million over the next ten years - researching potential energy sources, many not reneweables. Compare that to the $47 billion they spent between 2003 and 2006 developing dirty fuels such as oil and gas.”
• Working with… partnering with… Exxon as the people you can work with, making it more difficult, psychologically, to isolate their activities
• It’s an OpEd (our next “opinion editorial”) which, in discursive terms, directs argument away from the factual activities towards an opinion, subjective-based argument, which is much linguistically safer. Opinions can be fairly held and fairly defended (as opposed to evisceration of natural resources, which cannot)

• Energy is essential for human progress. Note, progress, not existence, or even maintenance of the current system. Do we need to grow, still? Capitalism is a growth system. If it doesn’t grow, it falls apart,  based on an understanding of debt/interest models that finance capitalism. So, energy is essential for progress = energy is essential for an inherently explotative system that widens inequality. For examples, these articles today in the Daily Mail, without any irony in their reporting in the same paper: inequality widens under Labour; the super-rich keep spending
• Economy is hierarchically before society in the discursive placement of the words
• “because the continuing predominance of fossil fuels…” - whether you believe this or not, or know it must be changed, it is presented as a fait accomplit; no argument
• Look at that picture. Child, balancing act, natural setting. It’s all so important that we keep supporting energy companies like Exxon to find the, well, right balancing act over energy for our children
  

• What game are we playing, exactly?
• Is that a syringe the hand of god is moving over the board?
• Three oil images, one car (symbol of consumption), one tractor (biofuel?), one solar panel
• according to some, the term ‘breakthrough’ should be banned
• Research into new technologies “could” transform our future. Well, they “will” if we decide and demand that we want to live in a less carbon-intensive society
• Why is “game changing” in quotes? Who are they quoting? Why do they distance themselves from this particular phrase? Perhaps because change, in all its uses (climate change, game change, system change) is, as they recognise at some conscious or unconscious level, an unsafe term for the majority of their ’settlerdom’ consumers

I guess these ads have made me more frustrated than I realsed. As a blog acquaintance George Marshall of the COIN network has pointed out, these ads are ’screw-you’ communications to the environmental momvement. Well, in return then…

Last word today
Pertinent to Exxon’s ‘change’ of heart on climate change, the rhetoric of the flip-flop:

1. The movement or sound of repeated flapping.
2. Informal. A reversal, as of a stand or position: a foreign policy flip-flop.
3. A backless, often foam rubber sandal held to the foot at the big toe by means of a thong.
4. Electronics. An electronic circuit or mechanical device capable of assuming either of two stable states, especially a computer circuit used to store a single bit of information

In many ways, number 4 is the key defnition for our late capitalist age and describes people better than electricals. The ability to assume either of two stable states without corrupting the circuit is a useful metaphor for exploring the positions that many corporates and many politicians adopt to manage the percptions and voting/purchasing patterns of the electorate and consuming public. There have been lots of examples recently, from Gordon Brown (read to the end), David Cameron, John McCain, and Exxon.

The ability not just to seem to occupy two positions (I am green; let’s drill for oil) but actually to occupy them is the schism that is at the heart of our global social system: one that a) widens inequality, and b) treats finite resources as infinite. Why else would we continue to accept this social system? Do you have another answer to this question?